In Our Time - Maimonides

Episode Date: February 15, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work and influence of Maimonides.Widely regarded as the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period, Maimonides was also a physician and rabbinical authority. Also known as Rambam, his writings include a 14-volume work on Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, which is still widely used today, and the Guide for the Perplexed, a central work of medieval philosophy. Although undoubtedly a titan of Jewish intellectual history, Maimonides was also profoundly influenced by the Islamic world. He exerted a strong influence on later Islamic philosophy, as well as on thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Leibniz and Newton.With:John HaldaneProfessor of Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsSarah StroumsaAlice and Jack Ormut Professor of Arabic Studies and currently Rector at the Hebrew University of JerusalemPeter AdamsonProfessor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one of the most visited sites in the city of Tiberius on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee is a simple marble tomb. This is the final resting place of the medieval philosopher, theologian, and lawyer, Moses Maimonides.

You get some idea of his importance to the history of Jewish scholarship from the Hebrew inscription, which reads, from Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses. Today, Maimonides is widely regarded as one of the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages. He spent much of his life in Egypt and was influenced by a rich mix

of Jewish, Islamic and ancient Greek thinkers. His authoritative magnum opus on Jewish law remained central to the subject more than eight centuries on. And his book, The Guide for the Perplexed, is one of the masterpieces of medieval philosophy. With me to discuss the life and world work at Maimonides are John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews,

Sarah Strums, Alice and Jack Ormond, Professor of Arabic Studies, and currently rector at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London. John Haldane, Maimonides was born in Cordova in southern Spain around 1135. Could you tell us a bit about the environment? So this is in Andalusia, Muslim Spain. of as a cultured affluent city, merchants, learned of people and so on.

He came from a family that was, we assume, a relatively affluent, professional family. His father was both a rabbinical leader, a doctor and so on. And he grew up, for his early years there, would have been ones of some leisure and some affluence, as I say.

But, and also the surrounding culture was one of relative, of tolerance, toleration. But by about the period of his ninth or ten, I think he was nine at the time, there had arisen to the south in Morocco, a more aggressive form of Islam. And Andalusia is invaded.

The city of Cordoba is itself taken. And this movement, this Ahmohad movement, really doesn't want to see either Jews or Christians living freely. under this they have a slogan, no synagogue, no church. And so at that point he and his family are faced with a choice, a choice that actually others had in other circumstances, whether to flee, whether to suffer martyrdom or whether to convert, and his family flee.

Can I just pause for a moment? He came at the end of what I've always thought was a golden age and thought where you have this, maybe I'm romanticising it, but I go to court, but particularly to feel this, that you had the Christianity, Islam and Judaism together in one small place, each with that place of worship, and a sort of ease together, a sort of ease. Is that right? I think that is right, yes. I mean, in fact, we may come to this later on. I mean, the history of Jewish philosophy in its first phase is conducted essentially in Islamic lands and then later in Christian lands. And I think it would be fair to say that Jews found it easier under Islam than they found it under Christianity.

but notwithstanding these tensions and so on, no, I think it is true. And in fact, it's interesting in Florence as a painting in one of the Dominican chapels that shows gathered together in this mural, Muslim, Jew and Christian, assembled in dialogue. His intellectual context was extremely precocious.

He came from a family of scholars. He was taught largely by his father, as we understand it. What would he speak? Did he speak in the prevailing Arabic? Or was he bi-tri-lingual? What was going on? Well, he certainly writes in, I think, was referred to as Judeo-Arabic, and others may help. Judeo-Arabic is...

Go on now. You tell me. Well, as I understand it, it's Arabic. I mean, this is in a written form. It's Arabic using Hebrew lettering. But he would have grown up, certainly with Arabic. I don't know to what extent, obviously, with regard to say the reading of scripture and so on, Hebrew would have been used as well.

As I recall, only one of his works is actually written in Hebrew. I think the rest are all written. in this Judeo-Arabic. But certainly he's growing up in a very cultured environment, as you say, his father's a doctor. He's studying science, which at that point is astronomy, optics, logic, some medicine. Later he's going to study medicine more.

He's going to practice as a doctor and so on. But very loud of... One thing, by the way, this said of him, which is interesting, because when we get to the guide, is it said that the one thing he didn't like was poetry. And that may be interesting when we discuss his treatment of the language of scripture later on, but clearly very, very late.

very cultured and at ease with the surrounding Islamic environment. And like his near contemporaries have I was saying in Averrois, a wonderful range, physician, philosopher, linguist, this amazing range. And there's one anecdote just to throw in here. It's probably not true, but it said that when he

went into a period of exile after Cordoba was taken, that he met Averroes, who I think would be about 10 years younger than him. I think that probably is apocryphal, but it makes the point that he was at ease with Islamic culture. Peter Adamson, after leaving,

feeding forced out, which they were of Cordoba, moving around Spain, going to Fez, and then very briefly to Palestine, they ended up in Cairo. What did they find this family in Cairo that meant that he stayed there and stayed there for the rest of his life? Well, as John said, in general, the situation for Jews living in the Islamic world was one of toleration. So what happened to them in Spain with the Al-Mu?

Mohuds was unusual, and they would have found a situation of toleration in Egypt as well. But if they were looking for a nice, boring, calm political situation, they didn't find it, at least not at first. Instead, what happened is that although when they arrived, Egypt was still under the domination of the Fatimid caliphate, the fatimids were actually on their last legs. So within a few years, you have a political shift in Egypt. Maimonides and his family actually moved to a city called Fustadt, which is sort of a suburb of Cairo, and Cairo had been founded by the Fatimids back in the 10th century.

The Fatimids are a Shiite caliphate, and they are one of the main powers in the region at this time. So when they arrive, you've got the Fatimids in Egypt, you've got the Crusaders up in Palestine, and then you have a Sunni force who we call the Ayubids. and what happens in the 1160s, when this is the period where we are now, is that the Fatimids basically invite the Ayubids into Egypt to help them stave off an invasion from the Crusaders. And this leads to good news and bad news for the Fatimids. The good news is that they manage to stave off the crusaders, and the bad news is that the Ayubids decide that they don't really want to leave.

and the nephew of the invading general, who dies shortly after this battle, is one Salach ad-Din, better known to us as Saladin, and Saladin first becomes the vizier of this nominal Fatimid Caliphate, and then becomes the Sultan of Egypt. That's terrific context. Let's get back to Maimonides. He got there, and there's a sufficiently large Jewish community for him to be at ease there, as I understand it,

and also, of course, he was perfectly at ease with the scholarship. this was again like Baghdad and Cordoba, a city of great scholars and great scholarships. Can you just tell us more about the intellectual environment of Cairo, in which he found in Mealsals? It must have been congenial. He stayed there until the end of his life. His son then became Chief Rabbi after him,

and his son became Chief Rabbi after him and so on. They implanted themselves there very successfully. Absolutely. And I think there's sort of several, there's two sides of this. So first there's what the Fatimans had already done before he got there. I mean, the Fatim and Caliphate clearly is in decline in this period, but they had created a really impressive intellectual metropolis. They had founded Al-Azhar Mosque and the connected Azhar University,

and so there were a lot of books available. It's a very interesting place to be just like Kordoba. And again, there's no kind of problem being Jewish if you live there. There is, as you just said, there is a community of Jews living there. We're probably talking about thousands of Jews and not tens of thousands of Jews living in Cairo at the time. So there is a community that Maimonides can join. But on the other hand, I think that it would be fair to say that when he arrives,

he's already a big fish in a small pond in the sense that his command of the legal tradition and the Tadmud, the Mishna, these texts that will be getting on to talking about, is probably greater than that of any other scholar who's there at the time. So he's a big deal when he arrives, at least on the Jewish legal front. if not the philosophical front. But do we have, as we had in Cordoba and as we know about in Baghdad, do we have this swirl, sorry, the swirl of scholars, the Arabic scholars, the translations from Greek into Arabic being widely distributed,

new developments in philosophy and sciences and so on. Is that going on in Cairo? Yeah, I think to some extent, I mean, I think that for, certainly for Maimonides himself, the Jewish community would have been the most important thing. It's possible that he was influenced by some of the, the ideas that come through the Shiite Fatimid tradition, this kind of Shiism called Ismailism. But I think equally important, and this is actually something Sarah has stressed a lot in her work,

is that being in Cairo puts Maimonides in the center of this sort of Mediterranean culture. And we know from epistles that still exist, that he exchanged correspondence with people all over the Muslim world and beyond. So Baghdad, Yemen, also in southern France, all over Egypt sometimes on legal issues but also on a wide range of other issues including philosophy. So being in Cairo really puts him, as it were, at a center, if not the center, of this kind of pan-Mediterranean intellectual culture. Sarah Stromza, not long after there arrived in Cairo, his brother, David, who's the keeper of the family treasure, was drowned at sea with the family treasure.

What happened to Maimonides as a result of that? I think in order to understand what happened to Maimonides with this tragedy, one has to recapitulate a bit and to realize what it meant to him when he came to Egypt after the family traveled from Cordova in Spain and in North Africa. Although, as John had said, they took the opportunity to flee when they could, we actually don't know exactly what happened to the family during the years that they were in North Africa, but I think our assumption must be that they outwardly behaved as Muslims, including everyone, all the Jewish community, including Maimon's family. And when they managed to flee, I think we have to assume a traumatic experience in the background.

And the first few years in Egypt allowed Maimonides some years of, peace and quiet to establish himself, as Peter said, in the community, in the Jewish community, and to write. And suddenly, with the disappearance of his brother, he had deaths that he had to recover. He had his brother's widow and a small child to support, and he had to find a way to support himself. And this is when he moves into court to work as the court. physician as one of the court's physician. And this is also... At the court of Saladin.

The court of Saladin. A man who's written about law and philosophy is suddenly dipping him with a court physician of Saladin is quite a jump. But never mind. Just leave that as another exceptional thing about it. Sorry, can you continue? So I think this is when he actually begin

to move out of the precincts of the Jewish community and to begin to move inside the wider Egyptian society. This is where he probably got into theological debates and conversations with Muslims. I think this is where he moves more into the public eye. So your interpretation is that these moves around,

these forced moves around, actually enriched his appreciation of the general Mediterranean culture and enabled him to do the great things he went on to do? I think so. Maimonid is a complicated person and he tells us that when his brother drowned, he experienced a year of real depression.

But he comes out of these traumatic experiences, as you say, enriched and able to cope with the more nuanced experience of human life. and this finds its way into his writings. How do we know so much about Maimonides' character compared with many of his contemporaries? Well, the short answer is that we are lucky. Maimonides lived most of his adult life in Egypt. And in Egypt we are fortunate to have a thing which is the closest we get to having an archive of documents.

from this period. Jews in all synagogues, Jews do not discard documents on which they expect to have written the name of God, the Tetra Gamuton. And therefore, they collect all papers

written in Hebrew and put them aside for decent burial. In Cairo, because of the climate and because of the continuity of the community, We have a collection, a treasure trove of documents called the Geniza, which was found in the synagogue in the 19th century,

and which contains Maimonides' correspondence, Maimonides' deeds, his writings, everything about him. And this gives us a wonderful opportunity to see his life and to see also his emotions. Including an extraordinary account of just one day in his life. which makes you exhausted just to read it. What he does at the court of Saladin, then back to holding his own court at his own house and writing. John Holden, you wanted to make a remark there.

I've got a question to ask you, but why do you do that? No, I was just going to say, I mean, it's interesting what's been said. He becomes effectively a rabbinical leader of Egyptian Jewry, and as has been said, he's writing to people elsewhere. And his reputation for brilliance, obviously, but practical wisdom, if you like. I mean, this business about conversion is very interesting, what's sometimes referred to as pseudo-conversion, so adopting the modes and the dress and so on.

And he says in a letter of consolation, there's a debate about this, whether it's a proper thing to do, and he says, no, it is better that than martyrdom, though better still for the purity of the law, to go into exile, to flee and so on. But what is interesting is that he sees, interesting, I think, telling us about the man,

and it's going to lead to his philosophical ideas, that he sees the purity of Jewish observance as residing in, as a world, the condition of the interior soul. And so the question about adopting the modes and so on, he doesn't see that as a risking apostate, you know, abandonment and so on, though he's actually accused of this, and particularly with regard to some of his teachings on resurrection and so on, he becomes suspect, and we can discuss that in due course.

But what emerges is this purity of intellect, I think. I'd like to try to tackle his works now, which are, well, here we go. Let's start with first important words, commentary on the missionary. John, could you briefly, I'm afraid, explain what he did there and why it's so important? Well, again, I shall need help from my colleagues possibly, but I think what we need to do to understand this is understand Torah. So the Torah as understood in a narrow sense and then in a broad sense. So in the narrow sense, it's the first five books of the Hebrew Bible,

which are by tradition attributed to Moses. So we've got Torah in that restricted sense. Then we've got Torah in the broader sense, which is the entire Hebrew Bible, what for Christians gets called the Old Testament, plus Talmud, which is the oral tradition, codified written down and so on, plus commentary.

So what he does is, and this is in his role as a sort of legal scholar, a juridical thinker and so on. He works on the oral commentary. at one point producing an addition, as it were, of this, but then also producing commentary on this. And this is a very rich source, both of rabbinical teaching and guidance commentary and so on,

but it also is going to lead into some of the philosophical ideas that will become the subject and treatment of the guide, which is what we're going to come to later on. Peter Adamson, just finally to get slightly more about him, can you give us some outline of the number of intellectual influences on him? very beholden to and very fond of Aristotle, for instance. Can we go from there? Who is he taking in?

So Aristotle, of course, would have been known to him thanks to these Greek-Arabic translations that you mentioned earlier that were done in the 9th century. And although there's some controversy about how much Maimonides knew about Aristotle, certainly he knew some Aristotle, and he was also deeply influenced by certain philosophers writing in Arabic who were themselves influenced by Aristotle. and the main figures here would be Al-Farabi, a 10th century Platonist and Aristotelian, Avicenna, who you mentioned earlier, and his contemporary Averroes. He actually commends to one of his students the study of both Al-Farabi, whose works he says are fine flower, and Averroes, who he sees, like many other medieval thinkers, as the most reliable commentator and guide to Aristotle. So there's certainly this strong influence from the Aristotelian tradition on Maimonides,

almost goes without saying that there's a strong influence on him from the rabbinical tradition that John has been talking about. And beyond that, I think that we can say very interestingly that this giant of Jewish philosophy and legal scholarship is also influenced in various ways by Islamic theology. So he, first of all, talks pretty extensively about the schools of speculative theology in Islam, which are known as kalam, which means word or elam al-Kalam, the science of word. He's actually very critical of them. He doesn't like the fact that they present this world which is not amenable to rational analysis because God can effectively do whatever he wants. So God could turn you into a frog and then turn you back again. There's nothing impossible about

that. And like of Errewe's Maimonides thinks that that's a very unsettling kind of doctrine because it limits our ability to find the world intelligible and to explain it using philosophy. Is there any direct Christian influence? Who's he influenced by the right? I think you've sent Augustine, for instance. No. I think the only Christians really in the intellectual background for him are the ones who helped translate these works from Greek into Arabic. Most of them were actually Christians. And al-Farabi is an interesting case here.

He was a Muslim, but most of his collaborators in Baghdad in the 10th century were Christians. So you have, I mean, really, if you think about what you might call Arabic philosophy, what that is is philosophers writing in Arabic of all. three faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And there's actually a case where one of Fadabi students had a philosophical correspondence with a Jewish philosopher in the 10th century. So that just goes to show you how ecumenical the enterprise was. Sir Sram Zah, he followed his comment on the Mishnah with the Mishne Torah, which I'm told, which you have said in your heart, is extremely important. Can you introduce us to that?

I think first we should say another word about the language scene of Maimonides. He speaks in Arabic, he writes in Judeo Arabic. He's fluent in Hebrew, but his cultural language in many ways is Arabic. And the Aristotelian philosophical tradition that he gets, he gets through the Spanish tradition. So although he reads Temistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias and Aristotle, he reads it all as it comes through the prism of the Andalusian Aristotelian tradition. The rabbinic culture that he gets also gets in some ways through the prism of what happens in the Islamic world regarding Islamic law. And we can see already from his attempt to write the commentary on the Mishnah that he already had his life work planned for him.

The commentary on the Mishnah was a preparation for distilling all the oral law as it is found in the Mishnah in the Talmud and putting it together into one code, which is the Mishnah Torah, literally the second law or the second to the written law. And as he himself tells us in the introduction to Mishnet Torah, his intention was to write a concise code, not really a Vada-Mekum, but something that would be concise enough, which will put together all the traditions,

cut through all the accumulated debates and disagreements and diversity of opinions. and present in Hebrew, in Mishnaic Hebrew, the end result, what is the law regarding every single matter? Can you just be specific once or twice for our listeners as to what he's distilling? And it's a massive project. It's an extraordinary thing to do.

And given what he did in order to live a life as Chief Rabbi and at the court of Saladin, Goodness knows where he found all that time to do all that way. But still he did. That's how he did. Just give us some examples. When you say all the laws, you talk about the laws of eating and the laws about barrel.

Is that what we're talking about? We are talking about things from the first prayer that you say in the morning, to the prayer that you say over the dead, and to the laws of what will happen when the third temple is built, and laws of sacrifices, which were as relevant. then as there are today, which means completely irrelevant. The book was meant to present everything that either the written law, the Torah or the oral law, ever discussed,

and to present the legal decision about it. Now, in Jewish tradition, as in Islamic tradition, before getting to the actual legal decision, rabbis would first of all go through all the accumulated literature, starting from the Bible, going through the commentaries, the Mishnah, the Talmud present various opinions, and then perhaps come to a decision. Whereas Maimonides says this is a waste of time. You can learn it, you can learn it in order to sharpen your brain,

but this is not what you were made to be. As a person, as a Jew, you were made to get to behave correctly, which is what the law is for, and then to think and to sharpen your brain in order to get to intellectual achievements. John Allen. Well, it's right to press a matter of detail, but it's also, I think, useful if we sort of draw back

and try and get a broader picture of the ideas here. I think really in a way he's looking in two directions, one to Judaism and the other one to philosophy. With regard to Judaism, what I think he takes, as other Jews did, is the idea that this people is the unique possessor of a revelation from God. and that what that gives them in Torah is a sacred history

and account of origination and development and so on, law and a covenant that they are covenant of God, they stand in a special relationship to God. Now, all of that he's very respectful of. With regard to Jewish, quote, philosophical thought, you mentioned Calam earlier on, I think with regard to Calam, he's not that impressed at all by it. And for the reason given, that if, on the Calam view,

for example, God could recreate the world from one moment to the next. so there's no intelligibility in the world itself. Reason cannot understand the world. It's just a flux and so on. I mean, if there is order, it's just because God has chosen for the timing to continue as at present. But what he's looking for is a way of understanding reality,

not just the question of what has been given in Revelation, but in the broader sense. And there he's looking to these two sources, Greek philosophy in one way or another. You asked earlier on about was he influenced by Christian writing. No, but some of the great Christian writers such as Augustine and he, are commonly influenced by this neoplatonic tradition,

which is a very strong intellectual tradition. So there's neoplatonism on the one hand, Aristotelianism, on the other hand, Aristotelianism is very naturalistic, neoplatanism is very speculative and has a rather complex theory of the emanations in one thing and another, but these two influences are very strong upon them.

And his attitude, I think, to Judaism is more with regard to questions like law, revelation, preserving the sense of covenant and so on. Peter, Peter Adamson, you wanted to come in, and can I press you just to talk a bit more about how he is, my monody's personal philosophy is emerging. Yeah, well, in a way, that's what I wanted to say anyway, because I think this issue about philosophy and the law is really embodied in what we find when we open the Mishnet Torah, which is this section called the Book of Knowledge, which he presents as a kind of set of foundations of the law. And rather surprisingly, perhaps, a lot of this consists of a kind of. kind of resume of Aristotelian philosophy. So he goes through Aristotle's cosmology, he goes through Aristotle's theory of the four elements, he goes through Aristotle's ethics. And he presents,

for example, the virtues as the golden mean, right? So courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness. He doesn't slavishly follow Aristotle by any means. So, for example, he says that on some points you want to adopt the extreme rather than the mean. So a good Jew should always be meek for example, and you should be not just the right amount meek, but as meek as possible. So he's not a thoroughgoing Aristotelian, but I think it's really significant that

he sees Aristotelian philosophy, really, as a kind of basis for which you could study Jewish law. And he really thinks, as Sarah said, he really thinks of Jewish law, the so-called halakot, the ritual injunctions, as a way of preparing yourself for this higher intellectual study. I think we should be,

distinguish two tracks that Maimonides tries to present. One is for the nation, how do you build a righteous nation? And for that,

the Mishnah Torah presents the code. How do you present, build a society of people who would be righteous and lead in the right direction? But there is also the way that individual can take. And for the individuals, there might be other ways. We can see that he had

two ideals for two models for human perfection. One was obviously Moses, who had it all, who had revelation, who had knowledge and who understood as much as a person can understand. And the other model for human perfection was Aristotle. So it was clear that for Maimonides, as an you could reach the ideal, even if you didn't go through the Mishnet Torah and all the halakhot. But for that, you had to be an exceptional individual. Whereas if you think of a group of people that would prepare as many such individuals as possible, he thought of the Jewish law as the perfect setting for that. John Holden, let's turn to what sort of is his masterpiece,

the guide for the perplexed, which he began in 11. 176, obviously we'd all like to know what he means by perplexed, but I'd like to just go into what he thinks about what were then great issues, God, the soul, whether there is a future life and so on. Can you just give us a taste or something? Anyway, what do you want to say about what he thought about those things? Sure. I mean, it's a very complex work, and it's made up of various elements,

and I'll say one thing, a couple of things about those in a second. Actually, in answer to the question, who's the perplex? That's a relatively easy... I'm going to say this. That's a relatively easy question to answer. What it's not for... It's not for the simple person who's simply observing the law in their conduct

and straightforward and so on, who's untroubled, as it were. And nor is it for the philosopher whose thought matters through in their own way in one thing and another. The perplexed is much more like somebody in the present day, who's a kind of well-educated person,

but who feels attention between us, where what they're learning from science, what they're learning from philosophy and so on, and say script, what they're hearing, in a church or in a synagogue or in a mosque. So they're perplexed. How can you reconcile the learning of the day

with the religious teachings of the day? That's who the perplexed person is. It's not the simple believer, it's not the sophisticated philosopher. The honest doubt. Exactly. It's the educated person who's struggling to try to reconcile, as in the present day, for example,

for many Christians, what science or philosophy is teaching on the one hand and what they're reading in scripture or hearing in homilies in churches on the other. That's the perplexed person. And what he's trying to do, is provide a reconciliation. Now the question is in which direction is that going to go?

Effectively, and this is going to get him into some trouble with some people, he's going to treat a lot of scripture as allegorical. He's going to say, look, you have to understand that this was produced for people at a certain stage in development and so on. The first thing that Moses had to do was get the people to believe in a single God. That's the first thing. And, of course, the imagery of that is talks to God as if God were a lordly master or somewhere or other, you know, in another place.

That's a stage you go through, but what you're proceeding to is the more philosophical understanding. We hear more about that, but God is beyond any category of language. God is beyond any sense of a thing or non-thing and so on. God isn't a being in that sense God is being. This is very abstract. But what he's trying to reconcile that with

is the ordinary understanding of scripture by saying this is a series of metaphors, analogies, allegories, but what you have to look for is the inner truth, as it were, the secret teaching, the esoteric teaching, which is going to be in line with the kind of philosophy I'm going to set out for you. As I understand it serves as Rom, he's also saying, taking the Aristotelian strain,

that by studying nature, it's one way to approach the divine, and there's also the question of God can best be divine by negatives, what he is not. But let's the study of nature. Can we bring that into play? My monida's assumption was that you cannot be a true believer if you are in ignoramus. And in order to not be an ignoramus, you have to understand things as, you have to understand the reality as it is, which means that you have to know logic in order to think correctly,

and you have to study the reality, as John said before, you have to study the reality and take it for what it is and not to force the truth on the reality. The truth should be what is reflected in reality. I think one of the things that is important to see in the guide is that it is not just a reconciliation of the law of Moses with philosophy. It's the reconciliation of the law of Abraham

with philosophy. The motto of the guide goes back to a saying of Abraham, who calls the name of the Lord as the Lord of the Universe. And what my monolithists tries to show that if you study the reality of the world, you'll get away from pagan

superstitious beliefs, the ones that were around Abraham when Abraham began to study the world and you will get to understand that there is a single God which you cannot really perceive. You can only get closer to him by understanding what he is not. Peter Herndamson, can you tell us, briefly I'm afraid, what is meant by negative theology to follow on from what Sarah's been saying?

Well, negative theology is basically just the view that you can't say anything about God and perhaps you can't think anything about God either. This is a long tradition which runs back to the Greeks, to the Neoplatonists, who have already been mentioned. It's also something you find the Almohads saying, and this is a quite interesting possibility, that Maimonides, despite his traumatic experiences with the Ammohads, may have been in agreement with them about this point and maybe even influenced.

But Maimonides does take this in a new direction. First of all, he takes an unusually rigorous line, so he really thinks you can't say anything true about God. You cannot say anything positively about God and have it come out true. That would be misleading. The reason it would be misleading is that it would put God on a par with us or other created things. So, for example, Sarah and John know a lot about Maimonides, so they're knowing, right? But you cannot say that God is knowing because then you'd be putting God on a par with John and Sarah, right?

You're not allowed to do that. What he says, therefore, is that you should interpret everything it says in scripture about, God in one of three ways, either just allegorically or symbolically, as a concealed negation. So if it says that God is knowing, you take that to mean that he is not ignorant. In other words, he doesn't lack knowledge that we might have. Or you take it to be what he calls an attribute of action. And what that means is something that's an attribute of action if it refers to things that God does in the world. And although it might sound like you're then saying something about God, right, God is providential, that means that he ordered the world well.

That sounds like you're talking about God, but actually you're not really, because what you're doing is talking about the world. You're saying the world is providentially ordered, it's well designed. It's actually a statement about the world. That's why it's true. It's not a statement about God. John Holden, can you tell us what for you is the philosophical or most crucial philosophical center of the guide for the perplexed,

nine for the public. Yes. I think it is this way of elaborating a philosophical theology, if you like. One thing I would just emphasize because I think in the Christian world people really lose sight of this. What Judaism is attached to all the way through and remains attached to,

and what from the point of view of Judaism makes Christianity in some respects abhorrent is monotheism. It is that the whole richness of the Jewish people is that they passed from the phase of polytheism of the people who surrounded them to believe in a single deity and an all-powerful, transcendent deity.

And we say Christianity, for example, when it introduces Trinity, it looks like, is breaking up the unity of God. So what Moses, my minder does, is doing all the time, is emphasizing the transcendence of God as the ground of being, the ground of knowledge,

God's knowledge is the same as reality. And here's the thought, what we are to do, how we are to perfect ourselves. We are made images of God, We have intellect, we have will. We are to engage in this imitatio day, this imitation of the divine, by becoming, to the extent that we can, God-like, by transforming the world that God has expressed out of his nature

back into mind through our knowledge of it. So the world is a creation out of mind, and it's a reception into mind. And I think that's a fantastic and enduring contribution. I mean, it's not unique to him. He's drawing in part in Aristotle there. But I think that idea that we come to perform, in understanding the reality that surrounds us is a very powerful and enduring idea,

though it leaves a question of what is to be said of the humble who are incapable of that, and that is a problem, I think. Sir, Saras Trumsar, is there a sense in which the mind is the soul? In my monadies. Only when he speaks to the multitudes, when he speaks to the initiate, he always distinguishes between the soul and the... the upper part of the soul, which is the intellect.

And for him, the whole purpose of human existence is the perfection of the intellect, not just the soul. The soul is a complicated entity. It has baser parts. And these are the parts that we have to feed and that we have to take care of. But these are not the parts of which we as human beings should be proud. The part of the soul that makes us really what we are, humans, is the intellect. Peter Adamson, how widely was he read in his time briefly? And what about future generations?

How did his work percolate through the centuries? Well, I mean, the guide was written fairly late in his life, rather. And so I think during his own life, probably his rabbinical works are the most widely read. But it becomes very widely read very quickly. late in his life and at the time of his death in the same year of his death, it was translated into Hebrew by Simon de Bonn in southern France

and that puts it in front of a wider readership and it becomes controversial very quickly. I think if you think about what Maimonides is doing in the guide, he's always treading this line between saying what reason can do and what it can't do. So can we

figure out whether the world is eternal? I know I've got to move to his influence. And so what happens is that some people say, okay, we like the rationalist aspect of Maimonides, but we want to take it even further. And other people say that we think Maimonides has gone too far. And in fact, his works were burned in France in the 1230s because rabbis asked the Dominicans to burn them

because they thought he was being too radical to Aristotelian, as it were. John, could you take on who he influence and how? Yeah, it was also translated into Latin. I can't remember exactly when that is, but not around that time. He does have an influence on Christian writers. Thomas Aquinas, you could think of Aquinas' standing's Christianity as Maimonides stands to Judaism, I think.

And, I mean, there's this giant figure who's producing this semantic integration of every aspect and so on. Aquinas refers to him, Rabbi Moses. He refers to him in relation to the question of the eternity of the world and creation and so on. He also refers and indeed de-fers to some extent to him over this question of negative theology. So he does enter into the broader bloodstream.

And it has to be said at this point, medieval philosophy within the Islamic and Jewish worlds, is a big issue, are beginning to come to an end. And where the baton that is handed on into the Christian world. So his legacy in an odd sort of way is going to be its influences of the ideas of some Christian thinkers. Until his recovery, but later on by Jews. Sarah, how does he stand in contemporary Jewish thought? Well, he achieved, when he called his book the second to the law, he wanted to canonize his book, and I think he achieved that. He became part of the canon in the sense that you cannot discard it.

You can interpret it away, but you cannot discard it. So people read the Mishnah Torah, people read it as if it's really the second to the law. people as you mentioned in the beginning of your work come up to Tiberias I think if he is buried there he would turn in his grave but people think of him as the topmost Jewish thinker well thank you very much indeed

Harris from Sir John Haldane Peter Adamson and next week we were talking about the Taiping rebellion against the Qing in 19th century China thank you for listening If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.